H264 encoder issues

[ParthShah]

Hi,

We are working on a custom board based on APQ8016E and using Linaro-18.01.

we see some low quality in our video recording files.
We wanted to play a bit with the Venus encoder settings and it looks like most of the settings just don’t work.

Here are some issues we’ve encountered:

• QP parameters such as h264_i_frame_qp_value and h264_maximum_qp_value are ignored
  • Usually first frame (and sometimes other I-frames) has way too high QP (30-35), I want to make it lower
  • Best would be to have max. and min. QP for each frame type separately
• setting video_b_frames to 1 makes all frames I-frames
  • possibly related (there’s a patch): https://discuss.96boards.org/t/how-to-spcify-encoding-parameters-with-v4l2h264enc-for-dragonboard-410c/3130/31
• H264_CPB_SIZE / vbv_buffer_size / hrd_buffer_size is not exposed as a parameter:
  • https://discuss.96boards.org/t/how-to-spcify-encoding-parameters-with-v4l2h264enc-for-dragonboard-410c/3130/4
• I-frames are not marked as IDR frames (keyframes):
  • https://discuss.96boards.org/t/setting-codec-parameters-on-db820c/5881
  • https://discuss.96boards.org/t/venus-encoder-i-frame-periodicity/8785/13

Please guide us here.

Regards,
Parth Y Shah

[danielt]

18.01 for DB410C is no longer supported and I believe there was quite a few changes to the available encoding options. Please can you share a test report for 20.07?

[Edit]
Note that you will need to be aware of https://bugs.96boards.org/show_bug.cgi?id=865 to evaluate the latest status and help you decide what you need to backport.